China’s Alibaba Group processed nearly 1.5 billion transactions yesterday during its Singles Day shopping event, with most of these transactions taking place over the group’s mobile payment platform, Alipay.
During its annual Singles Day event, which took place yesterday, Alibaba recorded sales (or gross merchandise volume, GMV) of $25.3 billion. Of that total, 90% of the GMV was on mobile, settled via Alipay.
Both figures represent a jump since 2016, where Alipay transactions accounted for 82% of the day’s total GMV.
The jump represents the continuing dominance of the Alipay platform in China, and demonstrates that Chinese consumers “have now fully embraced the integration of online and offline retail,” Daniel Zhang, CEO for Alibaba, said in the press release.
Created in 2009, Singles Day has quickly become a top event for Alibaba. For the past few years, its sales numbers have topped those of both Cyber Monday and Black Friday in the U.S. This year’s shopping holiday, like every preceding Singles Day, was the largest ever.